My boyfriend's band is soon to release an album and for the sleeve notes they need to know the Yiddish word for 'silver'. He's just spent an hour searching for online dictionaries, but either they don't have the word or they're currently unavailable. We don't know anyone who speaks Yiddish and we thought a 'catter might know out there.... thanks in advance!

Well, personally, I am not aware of dialogues of Yiddish, I only know of Yiddish and Ladino (Ashkenazim and Sephardim) but if it is silver as in the song The Silver Wedding it would be Zilberne (Di Zilberne Khasene). of course it could be Silber as the noun and it could be Zilber (just as it could be Di Silberne Khasene).

Being from Milwaukee originally, I knew a few people who were Yiddish speakers and I had a good friend who spoke Ladino (he was from the Italian Dolomiti, from Pordenone).

When I get a chance, I'll ask a friend who plays Klezmer music, which is correct.

"Zilber" if we're talking about a color. But if money or the metal is involved, Yiddish might be more likely to use the Hebrew-derived "kesef" . The accent is on the first syllable if one is speaking Yiddish. If we're talking about money, it's definitely "kesef".

Leo Rosten, in 'The Joys of Yiddish' distinguishes between Amerikaner and Europisch Yiddish. I'm sure that zilber is probably Europisch. Also, Fay Kellerman uses a lot of Yiddish and Hebrew in her novels. She lives in south California and North Carolina, I think. Her Yiddish is WAY different from the New Jersey Yiddish I learned. Come to think of it, it's different from San Francisco Yiddish, more central European sounding.

My paternal grandmother's maiden name was Rose Fine. Her family name in the town of Podolya (in Ukraine) was Feinzilber, which means "fine silver". When they came to the US, some family members changed their name to Silver, some to Fein, and some to Fine.

And, in case you all were wondering, her husband's (my grandfather's) name in Kiev was Kolchevni, changed to Cohen when he came to Philadelphia. (Not, as the myth goes, by an Ellis Island official who couldn't spell Kolchevni. He changed it himself, as was the custom among many immigrants, and he picked Cohen because it was a Jewish name that was also acceptably "American".)

I couldn't actually find any English-Yiddish online dictionary, any more than weepiper could evidently. Just sites with jokes (good jokes), and glossaries of yiddish phrases and so forth.

Threre's a story, probably in one of Leo Rosten's books, about a grandmother on a bus in Tel Aviv with her little grandson. He keeps on pointing out things excitedly, and chattering away in Hebrew - and the granny keeps on saying "Speak Yiddish". A passenger asks her why she keeps doing that and she says "I don't want him growing up forgetting he's a Jew."

Zilberne - Silberne: Derivated from the German silber=silver. Pronouciation: with a voiced S which is correctly written with a Z. Since High German pronounces any initial S voiced, you may sometimes find it written with an S. Z should be preferred, because in some German dialects initial S is pronounced unvoiced (as in my home county). The affricata which is in German written with a Z should be written in Yiddish TS (Same with Greek)